A new year usually brings new beginnings, fresh ideas and hope that the world will become a better place.

Maybe not this year.

We can have all those good things, but with it must we continue the constant babble of political candidates squabbling like errant school children? What happened to real debate over real problems? Some of the older generation reading this may wonder what we are talking about because politics was always a dust-up and finger pointing. But it was never before like television programming with writers on strike.

In addition to the continual presidential yard fight (hey, some of these folks are even now getting ready for 2012), we have round two of Rossi v. Gregoire. He's still mad and she is still trying to get her points across. He smiles all the time and she grimaces when she thinks. Both still carry the stigma of 2004, the race Rossi thinks he won and Gregoire is just glad she squeeked through.

But is 2008 going to be a rematch with the same outmoded and tired ideas?

Is Gregoire going to stand on the fact she has created a committee to research whether we have a new viaduct or let the traffic swamp downtown Seattle?

Is Rossi going to simply send out scathing bomblets everytime the governor says anything, anything at all?

This newspaper has asked the Republican state chairman to provide us with a coherant, positive program for the future of the state. We also have asked their comment on a perpetually one party city. We have told everyone who will listen that we hunger for positive, creative ideas from Republicans to counter the party line of the Democratic bastion of Seattle.

The response has been silence, often they don't even answer the e-mail.

But Rossi and the state Republican party continue to recycle four year old snap comments and their only issue seems to sling mud at the incumbent.

Gregoire is little better. She forms committees and tells her agencies to study things, but the chief executive of our state needs to do more than meet, talk, study. We do not need another Alaskan Way Viaduct study, we need a plan and a way to pay for that plan.

If Rossi does not like what the governor is doing, fine. What specifically would he do if he were in the executive mansion?

If they continue on the path they are on now, we may very well join the younger generation in simply turning off on politics and maybe we can find our own blog to tell us what we want to hear without any pesky facts to clog our ear channels.

Politics as usual is like the polar ice cap in the arctic, melting away to oblivion.

Let's hear answers, solutions and new ideas, Ms. Gregoire and Mr. Rossi. We dare you!

- Jack Mayne